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April 2-3, 2026
New York, NY
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IMPORTANT NOTE: Timing of sessions and room locations are subject to change.


Venue: Broadway Ballroom North (6th Floor) clear filter
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Thursday, April 2
 

11:50am EDT

What if MCP was Symmetric? - Jerome Swannack, Anthropic
Thursday April 2, 2026 11:50am - 12:15pm EDT
* What if MCP was Symmetric? An exploration on what would be possible if servers could call tools from clients. 
Speakers
avatar for Jerome Swannack

Jerome Swannack

Member of Technical Staff, Anthropic
New Zealander living in London, helped build MCP at Anthropic

Thursday April 2, 2026 11:50am - 12:15pm EDT
Broadway Ballroom North (6th Floor)
  Protocol in Depth

12:20pm EDT

Evolution, Not Revolution: How MCP Is Reshaping OAuth - Aaron Parecki, Okta
Thursday April 2, 2026 12:20pm - 12:45pm EDT
The impulse to rewrite the auth stack for AI agents is strong, but we cannot design away the fundamental relationships standards protect. This session explores how MCP is reshaping OAuth—not abandoning it—to meet the ecosystem's unique challenges:

The "Unregistered Client" Problem: Traditional OAuth requires pre-registration. MCP breaks this. We’ll see how Client ID Metadata Documents (CIMD) allow agents to bring their own identities to arbitrary servers, how it improves on Dynamic Client Registration, and how to mitigate the risks of unregistered clients.

Separation of Concerns: Why your MCP server shouldn't be your Authorization Server. We’ll cover how Protected Resource Metadata (RFC 9728) enables dynamic auth server discovery, keeping agents lightweight and security boundaries clean.

Enterprise-Managed Authorization: To stop "click-through fatigue," we’ll introduce the Identity Assertion Authorization Grant. This moves consent to the enterprise policy layer, enabling secure, scalable adoption.

Join me to secure the agent ecosystem—from discovery to governance—not by reinventing the wheel, but by making incremental improvements to the way it turns.
Speakers
avatar for Aaron Parecki

Aaron Parecki

Director of Identity Standards, Okta
Aaron Parecki is Director of Identity Standards at Okta, and active in multiple standards development organizations including IETF, OpenID Foundation, W3C, and MCP. He is an editor of OAuth 2.1 along with several other OAuth specifications, and has been influential in shaping how... Read More →
Thursday April 2, 2026 12:20pm - 12:45pm EDT
Broadway Ballroom North (6th Floor)
  Protocol in Depth

12:50pm EDT

Stateless: The Future of MCP Transports - Shaun Smith, Hugging Face & Kurtis Van Gent, Google
Thursday April 2, 2026 12:50pm - 1:15pm EDT
MCP is becoming stateless in one of the largest changes to the protocol since its launch.

This change simplifies the deployment of robust servers, making MCP ready for the next wave of scaled usage driven by agents and use cases like MCP Apps.

This session led by members of the Transports Working Group:
- Explores the upcoming changes - and sharing real data from Google and Hugging Face on the motivation behind them.
- Details the latest approaches on handling serverless Elicitation, Sampling and Sessions.
- Introduces the application and infrastructure patterns that can take advantage of the stateless protocol.

We'll also update on the latest roadmap status and expected migration timelines and approach
Speakers
avatar for Shaun Smith

Shaun Smith

Open Source MCP and Agents, Hugging Face
Shaun Smith leads Open Source MCP at Hugging Face, and is an MCP Steering Committee member serving as a Community Moderator and within the Transports Working Group.

avatar for Kurtis Van Gent

Kurtis Van Gent

Senior Staff Software Engineer, Google
Kurtis Van Gent is a MCP Core Maintainer and leads the MCP Transports Working Group. By day, he leads AI Ecosystems + Integrations for Google Cloud Databases and helped create MCP Toolbox for Databases.
Thursday April 2, 2026 12:50pm - 1:15pm EDT
Broadway Ballroom North (6th Floor)
  Protocol in Depth

2:35pm EDT

One Spec, Ten SDKs, Zero Excuses: Conformance Testing MCP - Paul Carleton, Anthropic
Thursday April 2, 2026 2:35pm - 3:00pm EDT
As the MCP specification evolves, so do the subtle behavioral differences between implementations that undermine the protocol's core promise: compatibility without coordination. How do you ensure a client built with the Python SDK behaves identically to one built with TypeScript, C#, or Go?

This talk introduces MCP's conformance testing infrastructure. Real SDK implementations run against scenarios that analyze their behavior and assess conformance. Each scenario exercises a specific protocol interaction from OAuth flows and Client ID Metadata Documents to resource metadata discovery, verifying that every SDK handles it correctly.

I'll cover how we built this, what we found when we ran it across SDKs, and how it's changed the way we develop and ship spec changes. You'll learn how conformance testing prevents entire categories of bugs, accelerates code generation of new implementations, increases security guarantees by simulating attacks, and enables evidence-based SDK tiering. I'll also cover how you can get involved: writing new scenarios, running tests against implementations, and helping close the gap between spec and reality.
Speakers
avatar for Paul Carleton

Paul Carleton

Member of Technical Staff, Anthropic
Paul Carleton is a Core Maintainer of the Model Context Protocol and Auth Nerd at Anthropic, where he leads auth implementations across Anthropic's clients and the TypeScript and Python SDKs. He drives MCP conformance testing efforts to ensure consistent behavior across the ecosy... Read More →
Thursday April 2, 2026 2:35pm - 3:00pm EDT
Broadway Ballroom North (6th Floor)
  Protocol in Depth

3:05pm EDT

Durable, Asynchronous, and Tricky: Implementing MCP Tasks in Practice - Cornelia Davis, Temporal
Thursday April 2, 2026 3:05pm - 3:30pm EDT
In November 2025 the Model Context Protocol introduced Tasks, which deliver first-class async semantics, something that is both excellent, and hard. Tasks define long-running operations with explicit client/server coordination, TTLs, and lifecycle states. They require durable state beyond ephemeral connections and require developers address distributed-systems concerns like stable task identity, rediscovery via tasks/list, mismatched sync/async expectations, and failures across retries and restarts.

This talk digs into all of those concerns through real implementations. We’ll examine what the spec requires, and what it intentionally leaves open (i.e. how durability is achieved), as well as what happens when clients or servers restart mid-task. We’ll talk about how to do idempotency right, and how those choices shape polling, backpressure, and error handling. We’ll also cover how to best do human-in-the-loop when the Task has input_required, all while avoiding any tight coupling between the client and server.

You’ll come away with concrete practices for building robust async MCP clients and servers, and a clearer mental model of the distributed systems issues the spec encodes.
Speakers
avatar for Cornelia Davis

Cornelia Davis

Developer Advocate, Temporal
Cornelia has spent a career at the forefront of technological innovation, starting with image processing algorithm development, moving to web-centric computing in the late 1990s, and then more than a decade working in cloud-native software and DevOps platforms. As a Developer Advocate... Read More →
Thursday April 2, 2026 3:05pm - 3:30pm EDT
Broadway Ballroom North (6th Floor)
  Protocol in Depth

3:35pm EDT

Clients? Servers? Agents? The Beautiful Asymmetry of the MCP Spec - Rohit Ganguly, Descope
Thursday April 2, 2026 3:35pm - 4:00pm EDT
Since its inception, we've talked about MCP from the perspective of Clients and Servers. This session focuses on an interesting paradigm taking advantage of the intentional asymmetry of the MCP spec - what if a Client was also a Server? What happens when we break out of a singular client-server pair and into multiple? What can this idea tell us about the future of MCP?

This session will cover the concept of an "MCP Agent" - a Client that is also a Server. We'll construct a system design for this MCP Agent to other servers and MCP agents and touch on several key considerations including auth and scalability.

Participants are expected to have an introductory knowledge of MCP, the mechanics of how Clients and Servers interact with each other, and a general interest in agent-to-agent communication!
Speakers
avatar for Rohit Ganguly

Rohit Ganguly

AI Product Manager, Descope
Rohit is an AI Product Manager at Descope, where he leads the MCP Auth and Agentic Identity efforts. Previously, he worked in Microsoft's Developer Division across products like the Azure SDKs and VS Code before launching the Azure MCP Server.
Thursday April 2, 2026 3:35pm - 4:00pm EDT
Broadway Ballroom North (6th Floor)
  Protocol in Depth

4:30pm EDT

MCP Vs CLIs: Why Agents Need Purpose-Built Interfaces - Sam Morrow, GitHub
Thursday April 2, 2026 4:30pm - 4:55pm EDT
You approve one sudo command (Ubuntu's default timeout is 15 minutes), so now your agent can `rm -rf /` your entire machine without asking again. You could run in a sandbox, but even there, `gh` can add a public SSH key to your account, or leak a token into the context window.

These aren't hypotheticals. Agents have deleted production databases and wiped drives using interfaces designed for humans, not autonomous AI. CLIs optimize for human ergonomics; APIs optimize for programmatic flexibility. Neither provides what agents need: structural safety boundaries, workflow context, graceful error recovery and auditable actions.

MCP can solve virtually all of these. This talk explores what breaks when agents use CLIs and APIs, and how MCP addresses these failures through protocol-level security, structured tool definitions, workflow guidance, consent flows, and registries.

We'll see why MCP offers the only sane path forward for safe agentic AI, and how it enables enterprise governance that unlocks mass corporate adoption. We'll also discuss gaps that still need addressing. You'll leave knowing exactly why "just use CLIs" is dangerous advice—and what to do instead.
Speakers
avatar for Sam Morrow

Sam Morrow

Senior Software Engineer, GitHub
Sam is a Senior Software Engineer at GitHub, where he leads development of the GitHub MCP server. He works on AI developer tools and helps shape agentic workflows at GitHub. In a past life he was also a professional drummer.
Thursday April 2, 2026 4:30pm - 4:55pm EDT
Broadway Ballroom North (6th Floor)
  Protocol in Depth

5:00pm EDT

Building a Workflow Engine on MCP: Orchestrating Processes With Tasks - Donnie Adams, Obot AI
Thursday April 2, 2026 5:00pm - 5:25pm EDT
What if your workflow engine wasn't just a consumer of MCP servers, but was itself built entirely on the MCP protocol? This talk explores a novel architecture that uses MCP's newest primitives to create a production-ready workflow orchestration system.
We'll demonstrate how MCP's task framework provides natural workflow step management, while sampling enables intelligent decision-making at each stage. You'll see how dynamic tool definition works at both workflow and step levels, allowing workflows to adapt their capabilities on the fly. We'll also cover practical challenges like handling OAuth authentication flows mid-execution and coordinating multiple MCP servers within a single workflow.
Through a real-world case study you'll see how MCP's composability transforms workflow design. Rather than building yet another workflow engine that happens to use MCP tools, we'll show how treating MCP as the foundation protocol unlocks new patterns for distributed, intelligent automation.
Attendees will leave with a deeper understanding of the MCP specification and how the capabilities can be composed to create production-ready workflow applications.
Speakers
avatar for Donnie Adams

Donnie Adams

Software Architect, Obot AI
Donnie Adams is a Software Architect at Obot AI, where he builds enterprise MCP infrastructure including the Obot MCP Gateway and agent orchestration systems. His work focuses on MCP gateway architecture, OAuth integration, and distributed AI systems. He specializes in building production-grade... Read More →
Thursday April 2, 2026 5:00pm - 5:25pm EDT
Broadway Ballroom North (6th Floor)
  Protocol in Depth

5:30pm EDT

URL Elicitation Deep Dive: Third-party OAuth Solved (and More!) - Nate Barbettini, Arcade.dev
Thursday April 2, 2026 5:30pm - 5:55pm EDT
The Nov 2025 release of MCP introduced a new client capability: URL Elicitation. This capability is game-changing for MCP servers that interact with external systems. But don't just take our word for it... Hear it straight from the author of the spec!

In this talk, Nate (lead author of URL Elicitation) will break down the "what" and "why" of this new addition to the protocol. You'll learn about:
- Why it's a mistake to reuse or "pass through" OAuth tokens from one server to another
- The confused deputy problem and other common pitfalls to watch out for
- How URL Elicitation unlocks a secure way for MCP servers to call external services that use OAuth or API keys, require payments, or gather sensitive information
- The correct security patterns for any remote MCP server project today

No need to be a security expert to attend! Nate will break down the problems and solutions in clear, relatable language, and provide crucial guidance for anyone building MCP servers in 2026 and beyond.
Speakers
avatar for Nate Barbettini

Nate Barbettini

Founding Engineer, Arcade.dev
Nate Barbettini is a leading voice in security and AI. At Arcade.dev, he's building the MCP runtime that helps enterprises deploy multi-user AI agents that take actions across any system. As an active MCP contributor, Nate is focused on security-critical work, authoring URL Elicitation... Read More →
Thursday April 2, 2026 5:30pm - 5:55pm EDT
Broadway Ballroom North (6th Floor)
  Protocol in Depth
 
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